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Why aren't computers designed to handle power failure?
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Raj:
It came as a surprise to me that even in America, where all the computers are designed one might have to face one or two unplanned short power outages every month.
To Stop computers from crashing, we use UPS...

Now the thing is, UPS converts 12v to 220v which is used to power computer, occasionally a monitor and maybe bunch of other peripherals when all that was needed to save the computer was a continuous power to the volatile memory and a little bit of power to the processor and other memory to give it enough time to send itself to sleep.
This would be most efficient if the battery were to directly interact with the motherboard.
Why don't we do this?
daqq:

--- Quote ---Why don't we do this?
--- End quote ---
Most notably because of the extra expenses and overall pointlessness. UPS devices here are rare. I know of one person who has their work computer hooked up to an UPS (notebooks don't count since they do this by default). And no one wants to change batteries, the extra weight etc.

I wouldn't want an extra compartment in my desktop for an event that has happened once this year (power outage) and even that was because a colleague was very creative when it came to hooking up cables.

An extra connector would be an option but again, that's another expense that maybe 1% of the people would use.

edit: Servers are a different thing of course, but powering data centers is a very different story.
oPossum:
It is being done for servers.  For example... https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/files/BBP/f_BBP.pdf

filssavi:
I assume the OP is only talking about desktop computer, as servers are a whole different world (there UPSes are basically ubiquitous, and things like storage arrays and disk/raid controllers even have their own battery backed RAM)
It just is a matter of complexity against usefulness...
Let's start off by saying that there are very, very few workloads where a power outage is actually an issue, mainly workstations running long simulations (days to weeks long). otherwise a power failure is nothing more than a nuisance. So from the start the benefits of designing something outage proof are minimal.
Now apart from when performing certain kinds of major updates,  the OSes are actually designed so that the disk always stays in a consistent state, so in case of a power outage the system is still bootable and stable, thus the downside is only the loss of what is in memory.

The addition of outage resiliency would also be extremely complex in the current market for economic/technical reasons:
- Backward compatibility: anything you do, if you want any hope of widespread adoption, it must be backward compatible with the ATX standard, mostly dating back to the 90's, so good luck.
- all PSUs now need to be intelligent enough to reliably detect a power loss and report it to the main processor, realistically the only way is coaxing intel into adding it to the ATX standard, because:
    A) it needs to be universal, not a different communication method for eack PSU OEM
    B) you actually need the OEMs to implement it in something other than their halo products, which is of questionable feasibility given the already razor thin margins in what ammounts to a commodity market
- Also software will probably need to be aware of emergency shutdown, as you only need to save the bare minimum to resume work (trying to save 16-32 GB to a bunch of spinning rust would realistically require way too much energy
- The solution will need to be batteryless (you can't expect a consumer to regularly replace batteries every couple of years, and beside good luck trying to find spare batteries for old motherboards
Raj:
"people won't like to replace batteries"
Meanwhile, we third world guys have to deal with using desktops cause it's too hot for laptops to not thermal throttle. But the ups are so horrible, they just save your pc from dying twice, then the battery is useless (doesn't keep the PC alive it'll it's done shutting down) *attached photo of said battery*

Specially since window 10 takes forever to shutdown the computer. (Night and day difference between it and Linux)
That should add a special emergency shutdown procedure.
And adding a optical isolated universal power failure detection port for computer to ups communication shouldn't be a big thing. Lots of motherboard have unused serial interface (rs232)

I've been thinking of attaching my PC into one of those sine wave house inverters which use 150aH (I've seen their batteries lasting more than 5 years)

Also I've herd that Intel is working on a motherboard system that takes on nothing but 12v, unlike ATX with its negative and positive voltages of every value that you can imagine being in a PC
Maybe that'll make it happen. So backwards compatibility should not be an issue in near future.

I wonder if the "economic reasons" is even a excuse, since most of the desktop computer users are in the third world. Cause Western normies often go for a laptop, even when they wanna game. And third world guys are happy to pay for a better one time solution than paying for reoccurring expense like changing battery every year.
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